Even so

Clevelode’s burglar alarm These fowl make a heck of a noise if a stranger appears. The River Severn is just beyond the bushes. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Despite it being very warm these last few days I continued to work either for myself at home or for others though on Thursday I didn’t work at all. It is now Friday as I write this late in the evening and there is now a much welcomed breeze blowing outside. It has become much cooler too. Temperatures reached around 28 or 29 deg C which is in the low to mid eighties on the Fahrenheit scale but the killer has been the high humidity. I had no work scheduled for the day so around nine-thirty after breakfast I decided to prune back the shrubs on the far side of our rear garden which had encroached too far out over the concrete path there. Now I can actually walk the length of the path without dodging and ducking to avoid the branches! A little tidying up of leaves and I was finished in just over an hour. It was beginning to get warmer outside by this time and too much exertion wasn’t advisable and I returned indoors for a while. As I had risen from my bed around six o’clock I’d had an early breakfast so was feeling hungry on the approach to noon and therefore had an early lunch. Soon afterward I decided to mow the lawn and it was hard-going because it had not dried out completely from the previous evening’s heavy rain and in parts it was quite long. It grows faster in the area immediately behind the house which shelters it from the afternoon sun. The far side of the lawn suffers in the heat of a summer’s sun. I had to empty out the cuttings about six times, four times as many as I normally have to and the cuttings taken from behind the house were quite wet. E had left the house whilst I was mowing the lawn and I thought she had gone with her sister who had called to drop off some clothes that needed washing. Her machine is faulty and she is waiting for the replacement to be delivered so E had offered to wash it for her. I went for a walk and thought no more about it. On my return home about forty minutes later E was standing outside our neighbour’s house chatting with her. Evidently they had called me on the phone but I hadn’t heard the phone ringing as it was in my bag and I had been surrounded by the noise of traffic. E hadn’t her house keys when she left the house and in fact she had only gone to chat with our neighbour but hadn’t let me know. I had set the house alarm and it had gone off whilst I was out, When I went into the house I switched off the alarm which by now had stopped anyway and I reset it and checked it out twice to make sure it was working. It worked perfectly so I have no idea why it had triggered when it did. It did indicate that ‘Zone 1′ had a problem when I first went back into the house to reset it so perhaps it was the door switch that had temporarily failed. Zone 1 is the entry door to the house. Maybe we should invest in a living alarm as in the picture! I went into the garden to sit out on the patio for a while, it was too hot to do much else but after a while I took one of the chairs off the patio and moved it into the shade of the house. I sat there with my feet on the cool grass in the shade but after ten minutes my phone rang and someone asked if I could connect a cooker for them. They had just moved into an apartment which happened to lie on the road at the top of our own. I called to do it and was back less than twenty minutes later.